Where Are the Wild Things?
by Cody Adams
Summary: An abstract diversion from the original story, this narrative transplants the main character-an eclectic giant-onto a journey that explores bullying, violence, prison, and the wild nature of reality.


A massive ball of a man sat cross-legged on a cold slab of concrete floor. He meditated—something he'd picked up from an eastern philosophy book from the prison library. The concrete floor didn't budge, or give in the slightest. It didn't contour to his body like those stupid wine-glass-mattress-jumping infomercials. No. His spinal cord dipped down, stabbing into the floor, wedged between the halves of his pelvis, dripping through his frame into a rock solid pool of psychosis. He wasn't in pain, though. His daily meditations wrecked his posture, rendering his nerves stupid. His overgrown bowl cut fell downward, covering his face in thin strands of blonde hair. The GasMan had been incarcerated in federal prison for nearly 6 years.

 _ **and in and out of weeks**_

 _ **and almost over a year  
to where the wild things are. **_

The GasMan worked in the prison library. A book junkie, he arranged the library around for entertainment. In the span of an afternoon, the GasMan could organize the fiction section by genre, chronology, alphabetical order of the author's last name, geography, alphabetical order of titles, and literary merit. If he wasn't scrambling around bookshelves, the GasMan either meditated, or watched soap operas, yearning for his Mamma.

In the chow hall, Mauri sat alone. Most days, he managed to transform the ingredients on his tray into some random sandwich. When the chow hall served up liver and onions, Mauri brought in peanut butter (a commodity he acquired from the commissary shop), lathered it across stale bread with a plastic spoon, and sprinkled the onion across his creation. He ate these particular sandwiches with sighs of nostalgic ambivalence.

 _ **And Max the king of all wild things was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him**_

 _ **best of all.**_

Before prison, Mauri pumped gas for a living. He worked at the best full service station in town. It was the best one because it was the only one in the tiny town of Arcade-it was the worst one, too, then. He had worked at Phil's Fills for the 14 years of his life. In the spring of '98, Mauri graduated from high school, took a picture with his beloved Mother, Sadie, and joined his uncle's business the following Monday.

Mauri was a giant bulk of a man. He dwarfed his 4 foot nine inch mother by at least two feet. He was stout, with burly muscles encased in a healthy layer of blubber. The raw muscle bulged beneath the fat, squirming to get free, anxious to be unfurled, waiting to be unleashed. Throughout high school, the football coach insisted that Mauri join the team. Mauri always averted his eyes, shook his head, and sped away awkwardly. He much preferred learning dead languages, reading classic works of political philosophy, and watching soaps at Mamma's side.

At work, Mauri mostly kept to himself. He pumped gas when told. Topped off tanks when asked, and collected cash when it was passed to him through slits of car windows.

For his 21st birthday, his mother bought him a pair of "utility" mittens for work. She picked them out because the finger caps flapped open and closed on sewed in hinges; this feature freed up bare fingertips that could better count and handle cash. When Mauri wasn't handling cash, he could swing the fluffy caps back over his naked digits and await the next thirsty car.

Mauri's birthday was also the mark of his annual haircut. He always had the same lady cut his hair, the only lady he trusted. Sadie gave her son the same bowl cut he'd asked for since boyhood.

She panted heavily, struggling to reach behind Mauri's ears across her ballooning belly. She vacuumed the hair off his neck and then sucked up the follicles from his "cute little rosy nosey!" They both giggled.

After his haircut, Mauri enjoyed his traditional birthday dinner: what he cheerfully deemed, "Momma's signature dish!" It was a creamy peanut butter sandwich with sliced onion on two slices of standard white bread, cut into nearly true isosceles triangles. Sadie was actually a pitiful cook. She had mostly eaten trucker food at decrepit stops along highways for a good percentage of her life. Consequently, Muari grew up eating peculiar sandwiches from whatever supplies were available in the barren kitchen pantry. Mauri didn't mind, though. To him, nobody on God's green earth could conjure up a PB & onion sandwich like his mother. She slapped each corner of the bread with generous globs of viscous peanut butter, toasted the white bread just enough to mimic the crisp of the raw onion, and cut the triangles with the prudence and acumen of a seasoned carpenter.

One afternoon, the shot caller from the Mexican train heard Mauri muttering Spanish into a library book. The shot caller took it personally for two reasons: 1) he didn't take kindly to no gringo speaking his mother tongue and 2) he was just plain jealous because of his own illiteracy.

 _ **And when he came to the place where the wild things are they roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth**_

 _ **and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws**_

The Shot Caller sent a man to gouge his eyes out, to silence his sight. The infantry returned rather quickly, missing both big toes and his ability to formulate coherent sentences.

 _ **till Max said "BE STILL!"**_

Unfazed, the Shot Caller thought it necessary to attend to the business personally. The GasMan scrawled a Mexican Proverb across the flesh of his chest: "Según el sapo es la pedrada." The Shot Caller returned to his room with wide eyes and trembling hands.

 _ **and tamed them with the magic trick**_

Naturally, the humiliated Shot Caller was demoted, not even able to read his new scar tattoo. No longer the Shot Caller, Miguel quickly lost respect. And muscle

mass. He served the remainder of his life sentence as an errand boy. Realizing that he lived up to his name, inmates left the GasMan alone.

 _ **eyes without blinking once**_

 _ **and they were frightened and called  
him the most wild thing of all **_

_**and made him**_

 _ **of staring into all their yellow**_

 _ **king of all wild things.**_

 _ **The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another**_

Mauri heard it before he saw it—that old familiar _Nas_ track blaring from the pounding heart of a static-struck sub woofer. A hollow nausea crept through his stomach and a knot seized his throat. His neck and jaw clenched so hard that his teeth felt joined by cement. The '95 Ford Explorer halted adjacent to pump #4, plastic-spinning rims still whirling. "Did your fat ass Mamma give you another haircut, Zero?"

Dax had bullied Mauri since preschool. He was a 32-year-old aspiring rapper that loved to hate Mauri. Doing so alleviated the realizations of his own glaring failures. Dax didn't like himself. He tried to muffle his pasty complexion with an even whiter do-rag. Every month for years Dax insisted that he had a big time meeting with some hot shot music producer; yet, he remained trapped in the tiny township of Arcade.

Mauri buried Dax's abuse for years. He had a high tolerance for insults aimed at him, but precious little patience for offenses toward Mamma. The last time Dax had verbally attacked Sadie, Mauri was suspended from school for choke slamming Max into the mulch of the playground. Rumors speculated that, had the boys happened to be on concrete, Dax would've died.

 _ **That very night in Max's room a forest grew**_

Mauri absorbed Dax's verbal assault, fixating his beady eyes on the hypnotic swirl of the spinning rims, thinking of Mamma. "Hurry up, dumbass. I am taking your fat ass Mamma out for dinner tonight and I'm runnin' late."

 _ **and grew—**_

Mauri shelled his fingers in the mitten caps and shattered Dax's window; he uncapped his fingers, snatched Max by the faux-bling of his neck, jammed an aluminum gas nozzle down his esophagus, and filled Dax with flammable silence.

 _ **The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another**_

A robed judge dropped her heavy oak gavel with an awful clatter. The clatter of the mallet echoed in the ears of a weeping mother and her son. Sadie thrashed in the arms of the bailiff, "Don't send my sweet baby to be with those beasts!"

 _ **and grew until his ceiling hung with vines**_

 _ **and the walls became the world all around and an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max**_

 _ **and he sailed off through night and day**_

The GasMan, centered at the floor of his room, sat in his meditative stance. A letter with misspelled words scribbled in blue ink lie folded before him. His hair concealed a gitty grin.

 _ **And Max the king of all wild things was lonely  
and wanted to be where someone loved **_

_**him best of all.**_

Sadie gripped the massive wheel of her rig. Due to her colossal gut, she had to adjust her seat back far enough to squish herself between it and the wheel. She was short, though, so she had to lasso wooden blocks around the floor pedals to reach. Valleys in the cushion of her velvet seat were filled with food, lint, and other crud. Her windshield showed splatters of bug guts and miscellaneous film—the kind that subtly accumulates on lenses of eyeglasses. She drove a red Big Rig with a Detroit Diesel DD10 14.9-liter inline eight-cylinder engine. The engine itself weighed as much as an infant elephant. She typically carried a trailer behind her, but not today. She felt naked without her load. The cruise down the highway didn't seem quite the same without the breezy sway of the long tail. Sadie had a type of rhythm when she was on the road. She read the signs and the signs read her; they recognized her. She had a trucker highway swag that most men in the industry couldn't quite place. She rarely took her eyes off the road, but was always looking through it. She kept an empty coffee can under her seat. The ping of her pee against the bottom of the can reminded her of dedication. The cardinal rule of successful trucking is this: don't stop to pee. An allegedly wise man who'd thrived in the truck trade for decades—a sort of mystical sage of the diesel world—informed Sadie that she would fail as a trucker because her female anatomy was not conducive to what he called "good, fast truckin." Stubborn determination spawned the innovative coffee tin urinal.

Sadie waited patiently for her green arrow at the intersection. What the light switched, she carefully executed a wide left into the Allanwood Federal Correctional Facility.  
Sadie shifted into 2nd gear.  
Then 3rd.  
And 4th, and 5th.  
She passed the minimum-security compound.  
Then 6th gear.  
Then 7th.  
She zoomed by the medium-security compound.  
Then 8th and 9th.

" _ **And now," cried Max, "let the wild rumpus start!"**_

Approaching the maximum-security compound, Sadie popped her Rig into 10th gear and deviated from the road into the grass. She barreled toward the barbed wire barriers that kept her from Mauri. She drove with the sassy ferocity of a pissed off Mother Grizzly. Pure black diesel smoke rolled out of the rig's two chrome exhaust necks. Sadie clenched her jaw and clutched the steering wheel with a grip that could choke out life. Just before collision, Sadie pried her fingers off the wheel to yank on a bellowing horn of liberation.

 _ **Then all around from far away across the world  
he smelled good things to eat **_

_**so he gave up being king of where the wild things are.**_

All three levels of the entangled fence-maze crumpled before the inexorable steel grill of Momma's rig. Her nifty downshifting, along with the sheer impact of the fences, slowed her down enough to whip an acute U-turn in the yard. Before she could come to a complete stop back at her hole in the fence, Mauri rushed toward the passenger door.

Sadie hauled her son off the compound before the nearest C.O. could even reach for his radio. Sadie reached for her ham radio and announced, "This is Big Momma. I have the GasMan. Let me know if we see any bear in the bushes. Over." Beaming, Sadie pointed to the glove box. Mauri unraveled the foil from his PB & onion sandwich almost as quickly as he scarfed it down.

 _ **and sailed back over a year**_

 _ **and through a day**_

 _ **and in and out of weeks**_

 _ **and into the night of his very own**_

 _ **room**_

 _ **where he found his supper waiting for him and it was still hot."**_

"My baby needs a haircut, doesn't he?"


End file.
